Gaming Performance Comparison

Recommended System Requirements

Game

Core i9-9900K 8-Core 3.6GHz

Core i7-8086K 6-Core 4.0GHz

In terms of overall gaming performance, the Intel Core i9-9900K 8-Core 3.6GHz is massively better than the Intel Core i7-8086K 6-Core 4.0GHz when it comes to running the latest games. This also means it will be less likely to bottleneck more powerful GPUs, allowing them to achieve more of their gaming performance potential.

The Core i9-9900K 8-Core was released less than a year after the Core i7-8086K 6-Core, and so they are likely to have similar levels of support, and similarly optimized performance when running the latest games.

Both CPUs exhibit very powerful performance, so it probably isn't worth upgrading from one to the other, as both are capable of running even the most demanding games at the highest settings (assuming they are accompanied by equivalently powerful GPUs).

The Core i9-9900K 8-Core has 2 more cores than the Core i7-8086K 6-Core. 8 cores is probably excessive if you mean to just run the latest games, as games are not yet able to harness this many cores. The cores in the Core i7-8086K 6-Core is more than enough for gaming purposes. However, if you intend on running a server with the Core i9-9900K 8-Core, it would seem to be a decent choice.

The Core i9-9900K 8-Core has 4 more threads than the Core i7-8086K 6-Core. Both the Core i9-9900K 8-Core and the Core i7-8086K 6-Core use hyperthreading. The Core i9-9900K 8-Core has 2 logical threads per physical core and the Core i7-8086K 6-Core has 2.

Multiple threads are useful for improving the performance of multi-threaded applications. Additional cores and their accompanying thread will always be beneficial for multi-threaded applications. Hyperthreading will be beneficial for applications optimized for it, but it may slow others down. For games, the number of threads is largely irrelevant, as long as you have at least 2 cores (preferably 4), and hyperthreading can sometimes even hit performance.

More important for gaming than the number of cores and threads is the clock rate. Problematically, unless the two CPUs are from the same family, this can only serve as a general guide and nothing like an exact comparison, because the clock cycles per instruction (CPI) will vary so much.

The Core i9-9900K 8-Core and Core i7-8086K 6-Core are not from the same family of CPUs, so their clock speeds are by no means directly comparable. Bear in mind, then, that while the Core i7-8086K 6-Core has a 0.4 GHz faster frequency, this is not always an indicator that it will be superior in performance, despite frequency being crucial when trying to avoid GPU bottlenecking. In this case, however, the difference is enough that it possibly indicates the superiority of the Core i9-9900K 8-Core.

Aside from the clock rate, the next-most important CPU features for PC game performance are L2 and L3 cache size. Faster than RAM, the more cache available, the more data that can be stored for lightning-fast retrieval. L1 Cache is not usually an issue anymore for gaming, with most high-end CPUs eking out about the same L1 performance, and L2 is more important than L3 - but L3 is still important if you want to reach the highest levels of performance. Bear in mind that although it is better to have a larger cache, the larger it is, the higher the latency, so a balance has to be struck.

The maximum Thermal Design Power is the power in Watts that the CPU will consume in the worst case scenario. The lithography is the semiconductor manufacturing technology being used to create the CPU - the smaller this is, the more transistors that can be fit into the CPU, and the closer the connections. For both the lithography and the TDP, it is the lower the better, because a lower number means a lower amount of power is necessary to run the CPU, and consequently a lower amount of heat is produced.

Both the Core i9-9900K 8-Core and the Core i7-8086K 6-Core have the same TDP of 95 Watts, and were created with the same manufacturing size of 14 nm, which means they will affect your yearly electricity bill about equally.

CPU Graphics

CPU Package and Version Specifications

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Gaming Performance Value

Performance Value

CPU Mini Review

Mini Review

The Core i9-9900K 8-Core 3.6GHz is a top-end CPU based on a refinement of the 14nm++ Coffee Lake microarchitecture.
It offers 8 physical cores (16 logical), initially clocked at 3.6GHz, which may go up to 4.7GHz using 8 cores with Turbo Boost, or up to 5.0GHz boost clock on a single or dual core. The i9-9900K has 16MB of L3 Cache.
Among its many features, HyperThreading, Turbo Boost 2.0 and Virtualization are activated and the processor has its multiplier unlocked.
This Core i9-9900K CPU offers the fastest gaming performance of any Intel CPU as of 2018, and will not be the bottleneck in any modern gaming PC. It will be able to play all modern games comfortably on ultra graphics performance at any supported resolution without being a hindrance to the accompanying GPU.

The Core i7-8086K 6-Core 4.0GHz is a high-end CPU based on the 14nm Coffee Lake-S microarchitecture. The Intel Core i7-8086K was released to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Intel's first ever x86 processor, the Intel 8086.
It offers 6 physical cores (12 logical), initially clocked at 4.0GHz, which may go up to 5.1GHz boost clock on a single core. The i7-8086K has 12MB of L3 Cache. Aside from clock speeds, the 8086K has identical specs to the Core i7-8700K.
Among its many features, HyperThreading, Turbo Boost 2.0 and Virtualization are activated and the processor has its multiplier unlocked.
This Core i7-8086K CPU offers the fastest gaming performance of any Intel CPU as of 2018, and will not be the bottleneck in any modern gaming PC. It will be able to play all modern games comfortably on high/ultra graphics performance without being a hindrance to the accompanying GPU.